From autoplot.org

Contents Reiner's Suggestions Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090528) Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090603) Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090715)

1. Reiner's Suggestions

• Section on Granny Text strings like "E=mc!e2!n"
• Discussion on URIs "vap:..."

2. Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090528)

• Making products - .vap - for multi-panel plots. Saving / restoring works fine as long as you don't change the plot. E.G.: made a plot of two panels, top pitch angle distrib, bottom spectrum. Adjusted the Y-axis range on bottom panel. Savd it. On restore, it now adds a legend in the bottom panel - which makes no sense for spec. Unchecked the "legend label" box for the panel, saved it again. On restore, the bottom planel plts real strange, message "inconvertible axis units", tons more legends appear, and the pitch angle slice value resets too. It seems to load in many many panels in the same location (like 21 panels??) Seems it makes a panel per slice....
• One you have a product, you can call it up by pointing to the .vap file. To use this in a script to make gifwalk images, you need to "aggregate" the url - how do you do that on a VAP file?
• Adding panels - gives error if the data URL is given as a .vap file. Kind of makes sense, but it would be nice if adding another plot product (which could be a set of panels) would simply add all those panels into your existing plot...
• Adding panels - adding a new panel often changes the settings of the other ones...
• On reloading a product it displays with clipped legends around plot (doesn't seem to autosize onto canvas). Cntr -/= fixes that.
• gifwalk script - tried to make a single panel set of plots, they all came out empty, with the message "no data in interval, data ends before time range". Turns out you need to hit the little green arrow after doing the "aggregate URL bit, you did tell me - however, this is not obvious, and should be done automatically!
• in autoplot, scanning through data needs aggregation of URL and then hitting the green button before it walks - again, this should be automatic.
• Giving a uri pointing to a .vap does not work in the gifwalk script.
• on a sopa pitch plot, default is still to start up with a slice through the time dimension - default should ba something as a function of time. Also, once I change theslice to say slice in energy to give pitch v. time, and then hit "make aggregate from URI, the plot resets to slice through time.
• Slicing through a rank three dataset - autorange only works on the FIRST slice. should autorange each time a new slice is chosen.
• OK. made myself a bunch of single panel pitch angle plots using the script. To incorporate this onto a web page I need the following:
  • How do I call gifwalk from a web page, pointing it at the correct location of the plots?

3. Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090603)

• autoplot
  • On multi-panel plots, the autosizing does not work on multi-line plot headers - assumes header is one line?
  • canvas font - as you re size the screen, you loose font sizing info
  • When you aggregate, do across all panels at same time - default behavior. Or have menu items (aggregate, aggregate selected, aggregate all)
  • When loading a file, and it "looks" like it could be aggregated, do aggregate by default
  • On manual aggregate, automatically reload file and adopt all current settings - currently settings are lost as file is re-read and settings are set to defaults
  • there is still a problem in the .vap files when saving products that contain slices of data. I have a product of two panels, a slice in alpha (to get spectra) and a slice in energy to get pitch angle distrib). On loading this .vap, the first panel first indicates the correct slice index(FEDU_ALPHA = 100) but then jumps back to index zero (FEDU_Alpha = 2.5). Checking the axis tab shows slice index=0. Now if I change this back to slice index = 10, save the .vap. click "new application", and reload the .vap, then it "remembers" the correct slice index. Exiting autoplot, starting it up again and loading the .vap - it's forgotten the slice index.

• pngwalk script
  • This works well, but needs some tweaking for user friendliness.
  • product name is hardwired as "product", provide gui interface for it. (I've hacked the script to do this, will send you update.)
  • noticed that is you run the same time-range twice it doesn't overwrite existing plots but launches straight to the png walk tool. Is that the desired behavior? I rather have it overwrite files, so that one can update plots without having to delete them first.
  • what is the native size of the png's made by the script? Can I set that? Or is that set in the .vap file?

• gifwalk
  • Sweet! The coverflow is gonna rock. Some comments
    • Vertical auto resizing when you resize the gifwalk window is not working
    • Perspective on plots is good - work on the spacing between them - less spacing on those closer to the middle plot. You can also play with the actual perspective - "angling" those closer to the center plot less, those far away more.
  • It's not clear by how many days you will jump using the >>> arrows in coverflow mode
  • if you launch autoplot from the PNG walk tool, and then exit Autoplot, it kills the png tool with it. Be good to have the two be independent - like you're busy in the pngtool, launch into autoplot to look at some detail, then exit it and continue browsing in the PNG tool.... This does NOT happen if you launch the PNG walk tool and autoplot separately - on closing autoplot, the png tool stays up.
  • You have the arrows, and the "Display Only" entry field for navigation. For "Display only" we need a help button that explains the acceptable time formats you can use here. We need two additional arrows - "first plot" and "last plot".
  • The existing "1-up, 7-up etc" selections are fine, but we need here "month" instead of 35 up, "week" (starting Sunday or Monday, this could be configurable) instead of 7 up. Maybe add another field for a mutliplier - so that you can select "week" and multiplier 3 = display three weeks at a time, etc.
  • behaviour for "missing" plots. It would be good to be able to see at a glance that there are some missing days. We should have a default "missing plot" image that we use for days where there is no data, and then provide an option in the PNG tool to display the data either without the missing data plots or with them.
  • location of .png's entry field - this works, i can enter a new location there and the toll then displays those files. Can we extend this field similar to what you do in autoplot (dropdown list of past locations) and can we add bookmarks for these locations? It would be easier to launch PNG walk from a website with a default set of bookmarks of locations of summary plots instead of having to maintain a separate launcher for each summary plot type...

4. Reiner's Comments / Questions (20090715)

Comments refer to autoplot version 20090710

• autoplot
  • product storing /restoring in vap files seems badly broken. See email of 20090714.Smae behavior of vap's not restoring right also found in version 0627 and 0620.
  • right-clicking on an axis gives a dialog from which you can get to the properties. Editing any of these values and then clicking "apply çhanges does nothing, the axis properties don't change. (tried to use this to set fixed ranges for the color scale).
  • In the axes dialog, once you edit the title, changing slice index stops updating the title.
  • In the axes dialog, transpose crashes things - no plot, just message "inconvertible yaxis/xaxis units". Clicking transpose again gets you back to a color plot, with the nice side-benefit of then autoscaling the data.
  • In the axis dialog, changing any of the plot ranges on x,y, or z doesn't update plot.
  • Colorbar tick marks look wrong when you're bellow one decade.